Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Some stuff I wrote

Here's something I wrote that I hope I can turn into a longer narrative.

Megan

In the blackness of her room, Megan clasped her hands desperately around her legs; keeping them tight against her chest. Around her, over the once clean white bed sheets and pillow, the blood congealed.
The terror that filled her now was unlike any she had ever experienced. It wasn’t just the strange emptiness she now felt inside of her, but rather the horror of realizing she didn’t mind it. When she had woken an hour ago to find her bed thick with a damp and sticky substance she had panicked.
She had gone through all the possibilities in her mind: the roof is leaking, I spilled the water jug beside the bed, someone’s playing a trick on me, someone’s in the apartment… The idea that a stranger was invading her privacy caused the little hairs on her body to rise in fear. She had spent the next 5 minutes trying to talk herself into turning on the light beside the bed. In a way she couldn’t verbalize she was more afraid of seeing an invader in the room with her than to have the same danger without the knowledge of it.
When she finally mustered the bravery to flick the light on she was only slightly disturbed by the sight of her bed covered in what appeared to be blood.

An hour after finding the source of all the blood, Megan found herself unable to get herself out of a fetal position. Her mind insisted that despite the evidence, what she had discovered could not be true. So long as she remained here, hiding away from the world, she wouldn’t have to face what she had seen.
She had also turned the light off again. An act she had begun to regret now as she desperately sought for something to distract her mind. The shadows created by the light streaming from the window seemed so dark and deep that she felt she was falling into them. At times she could almost see them flickering and straining almost as if alive.
Megan at last allowed herself the sob that had been forming within her for almost an hour. But though she wanted to cry and feel the tears falling down her face, they would not come. All she could muster were the dry heaving of raw emotion.

Megan had fallen in and out of sleep all day. The phone had rung 7 times and someone had come and knocked on the door for 15 minutes before finally giving up. She was aware of these things somewhere in the back of her mind but paid no real attention to them. Megan was beginning to think she could see through the walls and into the other apartments.
Sometime in the afternoon she had turned around and been able to see into her neighbor’s living room. She knew it was his living room because she had met him in the halls a few times. She had watched him work at his desk for twenty minutes, fully expecting him to turn and see her just as easily as she saw him. But he never showed any indication of knowing she was there before the wall returned and Megan was left to fight her terror once again.
In the evening, the floor beneath her bed had disappeared and revealed the teenage boy downstairs talking on the phone and watching television. The boy had looked up at the ceiling a couple of times but seemed to do so more out of boredom than realization that Megan was watching him.

At midnight the voices began talking to Megan.
“Why do you hide yourself, Megan?”
“Stand up, Megan. Reveal what you have become.”
Megan sobbed at this and asked “What have I become?”
“A God.”
She wasn’t quite sure why, but this terrified her. Her screams lashed out in the night, waking her neighbors. She tried to close her eyes to shut out the world but somehow could still see everything around her. The walls disappeared again, this time revealing every apartment in her building. She could see her next door neighbor walking out of his apartment and desperately knocking at her door. She watched the teenager downstairs get out of bed, bleary-eyed and wondering what the screaming was about. She watched various other couples in the apartment as they woke and cursed at her for waking them.
“Stand up, Megan. Become what you are meant to be.”
Without meaning to, Megan’s hands unclasped from around her legs for the first time in more than 24 hours. As she rose from the bed, the walls became crystalline and reflected her own image back at her.
Megan continued to scream as she watched black shadow tendrils wrap themselves around her legs and begin pulling her down into the darkness. Her terror increased as she watched the tendrils reaching higher and higher until they reached her chest. Megan tried to cover herself with her arms and close her eyes but the shadow tendrils had wrapped themselves around her arms and kept them away and her eyelids no longer kept the world out.
She could no longer deny the truth and this caused her to scream louder and harder than ever. Something had pulled out Megan’s heart. Not merely removed it, but left a large gaping hole in her chest. When the shadows swallowed Megan at last, all that remained were a blood soaked bed and the eerie hush left behind by Megan’s silence.